Greeley man uses individualism to become key member with Obama campaign

Photo courtesy Obama for America
Harper Reed poses for a photo inside the Obama for America offices in Chicago during the campaign this year. Harper, who is from Greeley, was the Chief Technology Officer for the Obama campaign.

DAN ENGLAND/dengland@greeleytribune.com
Harper Reed spends some time on his laptop in his parents' Greeley home last week for a Thanksgiving break. Reed graduated from Greeley Central as an eccentric but well-liked student. He now acts as Chief Technology Officer for the Obama campaign.

If you want to learn more about Harper Reed, go to htpps://harperreed.org, where he has posted the extensive media coverage he received, along with his bio and a few photos.

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A day before Thanksgiving, with Harper on the couch enjoying a rare moment of peace at home, Jamie Reed gave thanks that she could raise her son in a world without Facebook, cellphones or even a TV.

Those things would have exacerbated Harper’s rebelliousness. Just imagine, for instance, when Harper was a teenager. He created a level on the demonic video game Doom that was patterned after the inside of Greeley Central, where he went to school. It wasn’t a secret. His friends knew about it. But it wasn’t public knowledge.

Today? He’d post it on Facebook, and authorities would have looked at that, glanced over his wild hair, large earrings that hang in a double loop and grimaced at his coarse language and probably expelled him. Who knows what would follow? Jamie isn’t sure she wants to know the answer.

Instead, Harper was a big reason why President Obama’s team had the most technologically advanced presidential campaign in history, and reporters took notice. Harper, 34, was written about almost as much as Obama himself, with profiles in Mother Goose, the Chicago Tribune and The Atlantic magazine, among others, and political reporters swooned over his edginess in a world dominated by stuffiness.

His parents, Jamie and Steve, are just as proud of who he is as what he’s done. They should be. Harper believes they’re the ones responsible for it.

Harper’s look today evolved from his teenage years, when he had hair that changed colors more often than a chameleon, from blue to green to whatever. His parents raised their sons to be individuals and, as Harper put it, “not say ‘Yes’ easily.” When their TV broke when Harper was 3, they didn’t replace it. The only times they had it in the house were when they rented one over Christmas so Harper or his brother, Dylan, now 31, could watch the Grinch or when the Gulf War broke out. They played music all day instead and had long conversations. They got a computer when Harper was just a kid, and he spent far more time on it, in his parents’ room, than they did. He began “practicing” (some would call it hacking) when most kids were watching cartoons.

“He would crash it many times,” Jamie said. “But we knew he could fix it.”

Jamie said Harper could have gone either way, maybe even a scary way, but Harper disagreed. He loves to joke about his “weird” parents, saying things like “I never had a chance to be normal,” but they loved him, and he knew that, he said. He was prom king and president of the student council at Central. He was well-liked and never bullied. He created that level on Doom with his friends because they were in the school 10 hours a day. It was fun.

Rather than let his rebellious nature overtake him, he put it to use. He got the job with Obama’s campaign because of his ability to think differently. He worries about today’s generation because the computers of choice, the tablets and cellphones, can’t be manipulated the way personal computers could in his day. It’s harder to be a pioneer, when in his day, the burgeoning Internet spawned thousands of them, he said.

Harper was famous for his work as chief technology officer with threadless.com before Obama’s campaign approached him for the same position. From his base in Chicago, he led a team of 40 to run the back-end technology of the campaign. The centerpiece of that was Dashboard, a site created by Harper and his team that connected volunteers.

Volunteers still knocked on doors and made fundraising calls. But rather than make those blindly, Dashboard targeted people. For instance, under that system, veterans could call other veterans, and volunteers could avoid staunch Republicans. They also knew where to put their resources to get Obama voters to the polls and sway independent voters or win them back. It might sound simple, but all that adds up.

Many praised Harper for his innovation as a manager as well. He created “fail” days to force his team to learn how to deal with the inevitable crash when it did happen. He spent three of these days, as he put it in the Atlantic article, “destroying everything we had built.”

Harper appeared to need the downtime at his parents’ Greeley home just before Thanksgiving. He still works for the campaign, though things are obviously much easier now. The campaign was the first time in his life he’d felt stress, and it wasn’t the work. It was the stakes.

Though he hadn’t volunteered for a campaign, Harper is an active Democrat, and he didn’t want to blow the election. The worst thing he could do at Threadless was spoil a birthday or holiday because they didn’t have a T-shirt in time. Harper spent a little too much time thinking about the Supreme Court justices and other ramifications of failing.

“And this was the first time I no longer had complete control of an outcome,” he said. “You could do a great job, and it may not matter.”

Despite those stakes, Harper reveled in smashing the “uniform” of the campaign. All workers, he said, seemed to wear a blue, button-down shirt and wrinkle-free khakis every day. He chose T-shirts, maybe one that showed his affinity for hip-hop or death and doom metal, and wore his wild hair, the kind they wear in Whoville, and large hoop earrings in both lobes.

Harper once helped on a job for his father, who owns Property Technica, a real estate company in Greeley. Steve took him aside and asked him why he looked like a jerk, only he didn’t use the word jerk. He used a somewhat more profane description, but it was mild by Harper’s standards, who will drop F-bombs in front of anyone, including his mother. He was wearing baggy pants and a Marilyn Manson T-shirt. Harper didn’t have an answer for his father, but he has one now.

The first answer is easier: His look is his brand now. He doesn’t know what he will do, but he thinks he’ll start a company with his friends, and people know him by his image.

The second is a little more thoughtful. Even if he admits he may look like “an idiot” at times, that look is who he is. He’s had some offers to speak in countries or at organizations that would require him to wear a suit and perhaps not swear. Harper didn’t think it was worth it.

Even if his clothes frustrated his parents every once in a great while, they bought them for him. They gave him that weird name because they wanted him to be an individual, he said. Even from birth, he really never did have a chance to be normal. And that gave him a chance to one day be special.

Staff writer Dan England covers the outdoors, entertainment and general assignment stories. His column runs on Wednesday. If you have an idea for a column, call (970) 392-4418 or email dengland@greeleytribune.com. Follow him on Twitter @DanEngland.